The Generation of Monsters

The storm that night was loud enough to wake the dead—perhaps that was why Elias was awake when it happened.

He had been sitting in the laboratory, staring at the notes sprawled across the table, his ink-stained fingers trembling. For months, he had been working in secret, away from the academy that had cast him out, away from the voices that called him mad. They had mocked him when he spoke of building life from death. But he had gone further than any of them had ever dared.

On the table lay a form. It was not a corpse—at least, not entirely. A patchwork of flesh and bone, stitched together with precision, powered by something far older and far hungrier than science. It had taken him three years to collect the pieces: the heart of a murderer, the hands of a violinist, the eyes of a priest. It was beautiful, in the way a thundercloud is beautiful before it swallows the sky.

Lightning crashed against the iron rods above the house, flooding the room with blinding white light. The wires connected to the body sizzled, the air filling with the acrid scent of ozone. Elias’s heart hammered.

“Live,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “I command you—live.”

Another strike, louder this time, shook the foundations. The creature’s chest rose. Not much—just the faintest ripple of breath—but enough to turn Elias’s blood to ice. Its fingers twitched. Its eyelids fluttered.

Then it screamed.

It was not the sound of a human scream. It was the scream of something raw and unfinished, something dragged across the threshold of existence against its will. The sound rattled the jars on the shelves, shattered the glass beakers, made Elias stumble backward, clutching his ears.

When it stopped, the room was silent again, except for the soft drip of rain from the ceiling. The thing on the table sat up.

Its head turned slowly, its blackened eyes fixing on Elias. He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry, his tongue heavy. He had imagined this moment countless times—he thought he would fall to his knees in triumph, laugh at the gods who had denied him.

Instead, he was afraid.

“You…” the creature rasped, its voice hollow and strange, as if spoken through a cavern. “You made me.”

Elias swallowed. “Yes. You are… my creation. You are proof that death is not the end.”

It stared at him for a long moment. Then it swung its legs off the table, unsteady at first but quickly finding its balance. Its movements were unnervingly graceful, its stitched-together muscles rippling like snakes beneath pale skin.

“Why?” it asked.

The question was a knife. Elias opened his mouth, but the words that came out sounded empty, even to him. “Because I could. Because the world needed to see that life is not a gift reserved for the heavens.”

The creature stepped closer. Elias backed away.

“Then what am I?” it asked.

“You are…” He faltered. What was it? A triumph? A miracle? A mistake?

“You are a monster,” he finally whispered.

The creature’s head tilted slightly, as if tasting the word. “Monster,” it repeated. “If I am a monster, then it was you who made me so.”

Before Elias could react, it moved—fast, impossibly fast—and seized him by the throat. Its grip was iron, but it did not squeeze. Not yet.

“I did not ask to be made,” it said, its voice shaking with something between rage and sorrow. “You made me suffer. You made me scream. And now you call me monster?”

Elias tried to speak, to plead, but no sound came. The creature leaned closer, until its cold breath brushed his cheek.

“I will show you what a monster truly is.”

It released him, and Elias crumpled to the floor, gasping. When he looked up, the creature was gone. The door to the laboratory swung open, rain lashing in from the storm outside.

Somewhere in the darkness beyond, a howl rose. Not the howl of an animal, but of something new—something neither man nor beast.

Elias pressed himself against the wall, his whole body shaking. He had created life. And now, that life was loose in the world.